As co-founder and co-president of VoiceAge Corporation, Laurent Amar is responsible for the vision and overall direction of VoiceAge’s business and strategic accounts, which include business development in licensing and developing new markets for VoiceAge solutions. In addition, he is also the driving force in leading the sales team.

Mr. Amar has more than 15 years’ experience in the development of successful business models for technology transfer in the telecommunications industry.

In 1994, he founded Sipro Lab Telecom and concluded a licensing agreement with the Université de Sherbrooke to become the exclusive commercial agent for the ACELP® technology. He then positioned the generic ACELP technology in international wireless and telecommunications standards and as a de facto standard for the Internet. Mr. Amar played a key role in the creation of the G.729 Consortium and the “one-stop-shopping” concept for licensing the G.729 speech codec. He also contributed to the ITU-T standardization of G.729a. He continues to hold the position of president at Sipro.

At VoiceAge, Mr. Amar has been instrumental in building consortia for the development, standardization and commercialization of ACELP-based adaptive multi-rate speech and audio coding technologies. He has positioned VoiceAge intellectual property rights in organizations such as Apple, NTT DoCoMo and Nokia; in international wireless and telecommunications standards; and in the very widely deployed RealPlayer®, Windows Media® Player and QuickTime®. Mr. Amar has been a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events, where he shared his keen understanding of the emerging challenges and opportunities in the converging worlds of the Internet, mobile and traditional telecommunications.

Mr. Amar holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the École Polytechnique of Montréal.

Sylvain Desjardins, Eng., MBACo-Founder and Co-President
Chairman of the Board of Directors

As co-founder and co-president of VoiceAge Corporation, Sylvain Desjardins spearheads the company’s overall corporate development, manages the strategic and business development team and is responsible for the company’s financial and administrative functions.

To these responsibilities Mr. Desjardins brings more than 15 years of broad-based leadership experience in technology transfer, corporate management and financial and business development.

Mr. Desjardins was instrumental in the creation of VoiceAge Corporation as a spin-off of Sipro Lab Telecom, which he had joined in 1998 as co-shareholder and where he continues to stay involved as executive Vice President. In 2004, Mr. Desjardins was the main instigator in the creation of Vantrix as a spin-off of VoiceAge Corporation. Prior to these activities and starting in 1988, Mr. Desjardins was Director of the Technology Transfer Office for the Université de Sherbrooke, where he launched the development of the intellectual property and the licensing activities of the ACELP® technology in the telecommunications industry.

Mr. Desjardins holds a BS in Engineering and an MBA from the Université de Sherbrooke.

Redwan Salami, PhDCo-Founder and Vice President of Research and Development

As co-founder and vice president of research and development of VoiceAge Corporation, Dr. Redwan Salami is responsible for the planning, operations and management of VoiceAge’s research and development group. He also represents the company on the technical committees of international standardization bodies.

One of the key inventors of the ACELP® technology platform, Dr. Salami has authored or co-authored numerous patents, articles and conference papers in the field of speech coding. For nine years prior to co-founding VoiceAge in 1999, Dr. Salami was a senior researcher and adjunct professor with the Speech and Audio Research Group at the Université de Sherbrooke, where he was involved in the design and implementation of telephone-band and wideband speech coding algorithms. The results of his research activities are now found in many international and regional speech coding standards as well as in proprietary codecs.

Dr. Salami obtained a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Tripoli University, Libya, in 1984 and MS and PhD degrees in Electronics from Southampton University in the United Kingdom in 1986 and 1990, respectively.

Jocelyne Poliquin, CPA, CMAVice President of Finance & Administration

As vice president of finance and administration of VoiceAge Corporation, Jocelyne Poliquin is responsible for the company’s financial and administrative functions.

Jocelyne Poliquin has a broad-based experience in budget preparation, financial statements, SR&ED tax credits, financial management as well as cost analysis. In her previous role as controller at VoiceAge, she led the accounting and administration team in many projects including the accounting management of three (3) new consortiums.

Prior to joining VoiceAge, Mrs. Poliquin was controller at Bio-Rad Laboratories. She also led coordinator positions for projects in business analysis as well as price development at Relizon Canada where she made a key contribution to the development and the implementation of a computerized system for price determination.